Dr. Karen Stephenson is the president of NetForm, and a professor of management. Using scientific principles of network management she teaches up and coming business students the keys to business management techniques.

She is a corporate anthropologist and has held numerous appointments including "Visiting Anthropologist" at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) (1988-90), Visiting Scholar at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1994), and twice Visiting Scholar at the IBM Advanced Business Institute (1992-5, 1997-99). She is a contributing member to three think tanks: (1) a strategy think tank, the Global Business Network based at San Francisco, (2) a think tank for the protection of indigenous peoples called Cultural Survival based at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and, (3) The Agora, a cultural heritage think tank founded by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Dr. Stephenson has combined her practical and scientific experience from a 15-year tenure in industry and 10 years in the university to research and publish in the areas of scenario planning, the networked organization, and organizational innovation and change. She has transformed an academic methodology called "network analysis" and brought it back to business to reveal the often unseen interrelationships (e.g., the hardwiring behind the "soft assets") of human or knowledge capital in organizations. By revealing organizational networks she helps business leverage knowledge through 'seeding' social capital, harvesting innovation, retaining knowledge workers, planning for succession, and managing the rate and substance of change.

Internationally recognized in network theory and practice, she has co-produced four videos on this topic with IBM, TRW, Statoil and Stanford University. A dynamic speaker, Karen regularly lectures in numerous public forums and is featured in television productions on this topic. Her work has been recognized in The Economist (December 21, 1996), Forbes (May 19, 1997), CIO Magazine (July 15, 1998), Fast Company (September, 1998), The Wall Street Journal (September 28, 1998), Computerworld (Norwegian edition, October 23, 1998), Financial Times (November 6, 1998), and Officeinsight? (February 15, 1999).